1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to the field of display units and/or crew alerting units that provide flight and/or ground information to the pilot or flight crew of an aircraft.
2. Description of the Related Art
Runway incursions are the most noticeable form of taxi navigation errors. Increased scrutiny by regulatory authorities has only heightened the awareness of the safety issues related to runway incursions. Taxi navigation errors cause many runway incursions and present potential collision hazards.
A root cause of many taxi navigation errors is the loss of situational awareness during taxi operations. Taxi diagrams have helped correct the problem associated with the loss of situational awareness. However, taxi diagrams require the pilot to look down and read a taxi chart while operating the aircraft that is under power. This is analogous to looking down into one's car to read details from a roadmap or GPS navigation screen while driving. Accordingly, the embodiments herein provide a solution to taxi navigation errors by the development of a novel system, devices, and methods to alleviate the difficulties of reading a taxi map while taxiing.
Current runway incursion presentation concepts including alerting concepts treat the runway surface as a single entity for alerting purposes; that is, an “all or nothing” approach is taken. Concepts provide either a visual and/or an aural presentation that a runway incursion is in progress or imminent. Visual presentation concepts paint or highlight the runway in its entirety or outline (or frame) the runway in different colors. By treating a runway surface as a single entity for alerting purposes, a recipient of runway traffic information may receive false alerts and/or alerting.
Also, current runway incursion concepts provide traffic information by depicting a symbol of the traffic and presenting textual information adjacent to the symbol on the display. Although this provides a pilot with useful information, the symbol and textual information continually moves as the traffic moves. Also, the depiction of too much information tends to clutter a display, especially if traffic information is overlaid with flight symbology and/or airport surfaces are depicted as outlines instead of solids. Situational awareness and safety may deteriorate by cluttering the display and not presenting runway traffic with clean visual cues.